In the original episode where he was introduced, he was voiced by the guy who played as Lelouch from Code Geass (I think). But in the director's cut, he was voiced by someone who made him sound younger.

What gives? What was the reason for that?

"Who dares to summon the master of masters, the deliverer of darkness, the Shogun of sorrow, Aku!?"-Aku

Since I'm a fan of the dub, I'll give the best explanation I can (as far as I've gathered, and my memory could be foggy somewhere, so please feel free to correct me):

In 1996/7, ADV dubbed the original Evangelion TV series. For whatever reason, they chose not to dub the Director's Cut/NPC versions of episodes 21-24.

In 2003/4, ADV dubbed the Director's Cut/NPC versions of episodes 21-24. Since these included brand new scenes, it was decided to (generally, anyhow) redub the entire episodes. Certain actors had left or retired at this point, so their characters would have to be completely redubbed in order to maintain a sense of vocal consistency.* So, Vic Mignogna took over Jason Lee's role as Aoba, Monica Rial replaced Kendra Benham as Maya, John Swasey played Gendo after Tristan McAvery left ADV, and Greg Ayres voiced Kaworu instead of Kyle Sturdivant.

What's a bit weird about this is that some episodes (like 22) were completely redubbed, while others only redubbed whatever characters appeared in the NPC scenes and had changed actors. Episode 24 was a case of the latter, since I remember Kaworu's and the other re-cast characters' lines being redubbed, but everyone's stayed the same. (As a comparison, while Allison Keith would come back to voice Misato for the NPC scenes she's in, every other scene uses her original deliveries back from '97.)

*Oddly enough, this was also enforced with Episodes 25 and 26, even though they didn't have new scenes. So the aforementioned replacements (Mignogna, Rial, Swasey) redubbed their characters' lines in those episodes, for whatever reason. The dub of Evangelion has a weird and confusing history.

FrDougal9000 wrote:In 1996/7, ADV dubbed the original Evangelion TV series. For whatever reason, they chose not to dub the Director's Cut/NPC versions of episodes 21-24.

Simple. They didn't have them.

*Oddly enough, this was also enforced with Episodes 25 and 26, even though they didn't have new scenes. So the aforementioned replacements (Mignogna, Rial, Swasey) redubbed their characters' lines in those episodes, for whatever reason.

Actually that was quite sensible, as it means that viewers only got one change of voices instead of two if they follow those versions. But they kept only the original dub for the Platinum edition (they don't duplicate those episodes in that).

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